American Spirit: A Novel (34 page)

There’s no better way to be flying back to America than to have left going broke, marginalized, unemployed, low-spirited trying to get high, and now this. But for now there’s the same economy seat and anonymous quiet of life before it was all spun around. Alone now over the Pacific at night again, done with the Denpasar-to-Taipei leg, done with Taipei to Tokyo, halfway done with Tokyo to San Francisco, and then only San Francisco to JFK will remain. Maybe upgrading is in order for the last leg, but for now, economy, sleeping
against a sweatshirt against a window, hopefully through with eating pills and pissing red sandstone.

The window rattles and chills the head and it’s a little easier to feel the fight fading from the chest way up here on a night like this; a little easier to see that maybe all of these lives have one thing hidden in the fine print, that they’ve been closing in on the end from the day they began with a slap. All days numbered and ticking away, all clocks doing their sneaking by, all calendars spitting up squares until the grid is done with us—the rush of having it all ahead of us gone, the body aged past the promise of what any stranger might’ve assumed was within reach, time doing to all of us what we’ve seen it do to everyone.

Then again, a jet! A fucking jet! Up here, seated and fed, up here moping around in air we wouldn’t even be able to breathe in! And that doesn’t even start on the miles of sky above this thing, miles that go way past where gravity has any card to play. Men have stared at the moon and figured a way up. And pilots sit in the nose of these planes, steel and fuel and fire, seven or eight miles above the Pacific all night, and they touch down soft as angels without incident every day! Tatiana is somewhere up ahead, a thousand miles off the nose of this thing tonight, maybe even smiling. Chris is out there dreaming of boxing up mugs like there’s no tomorrow. Tim is coming down from the mountains, surrendering and heading back just in case he sees a chance to try and take Manhattan again.

Maybe it’s not so hard to have a little faith. Maybe it is time to be done with every bad decision that has prolonged the pain of transition—guns, half-assed drugs, drinking, that thing where one is thinking they have everyone fooled, never realizing everyone saw what you were going through, and you were the last to know and everyone knew it. Milton is down there alive and waiting for the next session, right? And wait until he hears just how much progress there has been. Sure there are catches to starting one’s life all over again; this is going to hurt, this is going to be the heavy lifting, this is saying good-bye to the gun before getting the hang of it, and saying good-bye to drugs and drink and to the lonely pornography from under the driver’s seat. Well, maybe not good-bye to the porn, maybe don’t quit everything at the same time and go insane. But yes, let’s get rid of some of the crutches; let’s ask for help when it is needed; learn to have a little faith that there’s still time, no matter how much was wasted. Maybe whatever life one gets is more than we were ever owed to begin with. And all that time wasted on the job thinking one was getting over on the bosses, well, the end is going to come, and in the end, we will all realize the time we thought we were clever for wasting was ours all along.

So, what are we waiting for? Keep this free bird pointed east, Captain! Bring it down gently right at the minute the first half of the big mug money direct deposit from Los Angeles hits! Come on, let’s live, there will be time enough for everyone to find their loves and friends and family as ghosts
in the end, and maybe then everyone can meet up again. In the meantime, the sad songs are gone; the cigarettes and anthems of the downtrodden have fallen by the wayside in the shadow of a hospital and hotel; there will be new songs now, and they won’t be songs about things going wrong. There’s nothing to lose but what time’s already planning to take.

Thank you, Mom, Dad, Trish, for getting to earth and every single kindness. Thank you John Murphy. Thank you Maria. Maria! Thanks James Levine and Daniel Greenberg and everyone at Levine Greenberg. Thank you Larry Kirshbaum, Ed Park, Carmen Johnson, Julia Cheiffetz, Maggie Sivon, Justin Renard, Alexandra Woodworth, and everyone at Amazon Publishing in New York. Thanks to George Dawes Green, Joan Firestone, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Maggie Cino, Catherine McCarthy, Robin Wachsberger, Kate Tellers, Kirsty Bennett, Paul Ruest, Daisy Rosario, David Mutton, Brandon Echter, and every single person from Stories at The Moth in New York City, past and present—Joey Xanders, Lea Thau! Joshua Wolf Shenk, thank you as always. Thanks to Pamela Koslyn, Esq. Thank you Christopher
Monks, Jordan Bass, Jory John and everyone at McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, and The Rumpus. Thanks to Raha Naddaf. And to Jim Nelson and Michael Benoist at GQ. Hello to Michael Patrick King and thanks for making me laugh so damn hard after a crazy beautiful strange gig so far from home. Thank you Amanda, Ben, Janine, Nat, Dave, Eric, Peter, Lotta, Atkins, Doug, Loren, Cam, Sheri, King, Juliet, John, Susan, Jeff, Norm, Scot, Ravi, Courtney, Alex, Karen, J.C., Leroy, Aaron, Dan, Paul, Linda, Kevin, B. Frayn, London, Lyle.

MANIFEST AND WAYBILL:
20 pages in 2003 on Wall Street, stopped, started again in 2006 on 35th street, stopped, started again in 2008, stopped, started again in a cabin in upstate New York, August 2010. Finished 10/21/11 on West 11th St. Daniel Greenberg emailed that it had a home and contract on 03/12/12. I mention this because I have said that writing is easy work one too many times and it finally bit me in the ass.

File under: Pressure.

DAN KENNEDY
is a writer living in New York. He is author of the memoirs Loser Goes First and Rock On, host of The Moth storytelling podcast and live events, and a contributor to GQ and McSweeney’s. His stories have been featured on the Peabody Award–winning Moth Radio Hour.